Today is a day I got not one thing done for myself due to the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature release sucking all the oxygen out of the climate debate with their pre-peer review release shenanigans. Tonight was no different, as I spent it watching Dr. Ben Santer give a presentation at Chico State University. I had a front row seat, as you can see below:
First I’d like to say that no, he didn’t try to make good on the famous Climategate email line about Pat Michaels. Both he and the host, Jim Pushnik were quite gracious, with both of them talking to me personally. I was prepared to stand up and argue the use of the word “denier” should Dr. Santer have used it, fortunately he did not. I was surprised that Dr. Santer recognized me when I asked a question (I talked with him afterwards), unfortunately, I didn’t phrase the question well enough, and I should have brought a printout of the graph I was thinking of with me. More here.
Here’s the program, video follows.
From CSUC
Dr. Ben Santer Speaks on Climate Change, Oct. 20
Please join us October 20th for an important climate event!
Dr. Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will speak on “The causes of recent climate change: Separating fact from fiction”
Date: Thursday, October 20th
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Place: Colusa Hall Conference Center, Room 100
Cost: Free and open to the public, seating may be limited.
Climate scientist Ben Santer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), shared in the Nobel Prize awarded to the IPCC and has received a Distinguished Fellowship from the American Geophysical Union, and MacArthur Genius Fellowship for his research on human‐induced climate change (read full story).
Dr. Benjamin Santer is currently a atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). His research focuses on such topics as climate model evaluation, the use of statistical methods in climate science, and identification of natural and anthropogenic “fingerprints” in observed climate records. Dr. Santer’s early research on the climatic effects of combined changes in greenhouse gases (GHGs) and sulfate aerosols contributed to the historic “discernible human influence” conclusion of the 1995 Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Santer, is considered an expert in the climate change research community, has worked in the Laboratory’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Inter-comparison (PCMDI) for nearly 20 years, and is a frequent contributor to congressional hearings on the science of climate change. He credits his success to the exceptional scientists he collaborates with at LLNL.
Presented by The Institute for Sustainable Development, the Rawlins Endowed Professorship for Environmental Literacy, and the Gateway Science Museum.
==============================================================
Part 2 – only 3 minutes of Q&A and then my battery died, there was about 5 minutes of questions after that.
Anthony,
Just a note of support. I appreciate that you’ve been through quite a lot recently. We all owe you quite a bit. WHen the history of this whole fiasco is finally written, you’ll be remembered as one of the heroes. I’ll be making my appreciation more tangible by way of the tip jar later today. Hope others follow suit…
PG
Rational Debate says:
October 21, 2011 at 3:28 am
“I also suspect digital compression and/or signal saturation issues may be playing a part in why it seems all too often anymore TV, movie, etc., background music tracts may sound loud enough or too loud, but the speaking can barely be made out. I may be wrong about that, but it’s my suspicion. There’s no question it’s happening with music. This short video is a real eye opener:”
Sound compressors (amplifiers that are automatically cranked up during silent phases and down during loud phases, reducing the dynamic) have been used since at least the early 70ies in the good old analog days, and much heavier than today, as the dynamic range of vinyl recordings was much smaller than todays CD’s and digital formats. It has also been used for ages for all kinds of broadcast media to compress the dynamic range of newsspeakers voices.
The myth of the loudness wars was started by slashdot by somebody who complained about a mysteriously saturated Rush album; which was so maxed out that the spikes of the drums got cut off, as your video shows, and sounded sh*t.
Turns out that the Rush people tried to mix that record themselves instead of hiring a sound engineer; and botched it…
Digital compression formats have nothing to do with it, encoding the amplitude is easy; the tricky part of a format like MP3 is encoding the audible frequencies in a space-efficient manner. Proof: It is possible to encode an opera just as well as a piece of radio pop music; and preserve the dynamic range of the classical music. Try it. It works.
“Turn up your volume, and sheesh I’ve spent my whole day servicing people and the cause of skepticism on my blog, I’ve taken abuse of all sorts, got no work done for myself, and now you want me to spend time to transcribe and paraphrase questions for you? And you still haven’t figured out from the several blog posts I’ve written and my about page that I’m hearing impaired and couldn’t hear the questions, much less Dr. Santer talking to me directly and I had to ask him to speak up? 24 hours timeout for you – Anthony”
Anthony has my unconditional support here. People are asking far too much of volunteers.
Great job- this is an important step in opening up a real debate, indeed in opening up an adult conversation. If skeptics want concerns addressed and questions answered we need inroads and healthy relationships… ultimately this is the way the rank and file of the warmists will be able to back down off the limb theyve put themselves on and get to a place where we can have sane conversations about resources and goals (of course the zealots and those too cozy with their money and power will never come around, but isolating them and exposing them for what they are is the best we can hope for).
So this is the Santer who changed the “no discernable human influence” to discernable human influence, and had thousands of scientists asking for their names to be taken off the IPCC document!
As for punching someone?looks like the only thing he’s punched is a hole a candy bag.
The used car salesman in the video plays some nice logical tricks.
First video, 50:30 :
“A 10 year choke does not constitute evidence for the absence [of AGW]”
Switched the Null Hypothesis, look Ma, no hands.
Weasel.
Mark Buehner says:
October 21, 2011 at 7:37 am
“ultimately this is the way the rank and file of the warmists will be able to back down off the limb theyve put themselves on and get to a place where we can have sane conversations about resources and goals ”
Their attitude is “Gimme!”; didn’t you notice that by now. That’s why they play the game.
Anthony:
There is a much more damning graph. It is the emissivity of CO2 from Leckner. And yes Mosh, this is based on solutions to the RTE’s. Rather than the logarithmic relation modelled by MODTRAN (an approximation of the HITRAN database, if I’m not mistaken), the relation from Leckner (a different approximation) appears more hyperbolic with the asymptote being nearly parallel to the x axis. The difference is the Leckner work covers higher levels of CO2 than MODTRAN. The Leckner work generates curves that are nearly identical to MODTRAN at atmospheric levels of CO2. This is of course obvious as they are approximate solutions to the same equations. Absorbance will continually rise as concentration increases, but the rate of rise is so low that it can be ignored for all levels of CO2 that are likely to occur in our atmosphere. If you were to plot the absorbance to black, one would need a different value than ppm of CO2 for the x axis, as the amount of CO2 that would be needed to cause absorptivity of 1 would be much much more than 100% of our atmosphere at 1 bar pressure at sea level.
Dear Anthony,
What we are watching here is the leverage of already decided politics (AGW) over sound and independent science. These politics contain control mechanisms which can unfortunately only be countered by political means backed by independent scientists. Therefore look for intelligent and open minded politicians. As you showed earlier with the brilliant expose covering the failed “Gore-CO2” experiment, if such results are only presented to “our crowd” of “sceptics”, we (reason) have failed.
‘Sound engineering’ is a lost art; very few ppl watch the VU meter input levels to the recording device anymore (this does a couple things: 1) assures the digitizing stage is not saturated or ‘clipped’ and 2) assures the best S/N ratio possible) …
Of course, live recordings have their own issues, but, at least the better post-production editing s/w can equalize volume across the entire recording, all of which takes effort and time, the latter being a component in short supply on occasion.
Nonetheless, thanks for the videos Anthony.
.
p gosselin says:
October 21, 2011 at 1:55 am
It amazes me how the sun drove the climate on earth for 4.5 billion years
It actually didn’t. Billions of years agot the Sun was 30% less bright than today, yet there was liquid water on our planet. Most researchers ascribe that to greenhouse gases having much higher concentration then than now.
In the end, the one question Dr.Santer and all claiming humans are responsible for this must answer: If in 2030, the earths temperature has returned to levels as measured by objective satellite based instruments at the start of the warm PDO in the late 1970s, will you admit your position to be incorrect? If they answer yes, then the simple follow up is to wait and see rather than chasing what could be a ghost. If they answer no, they expose themselves as the agenda driven people many of them are. Either way, its a simple test over a very short period of time relative to the majesty of the creation, and one must be arrogant or ignorant.. or perhaps both, to not allow for the chance to make sure one has the correct answer in this matter
Anthony, thanks for the video.
Somehow Santer sidesteps the data from 7 radiosonde/satellite data sets that show the lack of a hot spot at the top of the troposphere over the tropics. This lack of a hotspot means that either the surface temperature data set is wrong or the theory of greenhouse forcing of global temperatures is wrong.
The simple truth is that there is no direct fact-based evidence that human activity has had or is having any detectable impact on global climate, leaving the AGW hypothesis as what it has always been, mere speculation. If such evidence existed we would doubtless all know about it.
“When all is said and done much more will be said than done.” – Lou Holtz
“.. shared in the Nobel Prize awarded to the IPCC ..”
As did the “contributors” who made the claim the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, and the host of other ridiculous claims therein. At least the peace prize has nothing to do with science, (or working for peace for that matter.)
“”””” Leif Svalgaard says:
October 21, 2011 at 9:39 am
p gosselin says:
October 21, 2011 at 1:55 am
It amazes me how the sun drove the climate on earth for 4.5 billion years
It actually didn’t. Billions of years agot the Sun was 30% less bright than today, yet there was liquid water on our planet. Most researchers ascribe that to greenhouse gases having much higher concentration then than now “””””
Well with 30% less sun, I would hazard a guess that there was likely only about half of the present 60 odd percent of global cloud cover, and that probably means a similar drop in total global atmospheric water content. Not much need to change any other GHGs.
It’s the water !!.
i.e.
Less H2O, more sunlight reaches and gets stored in the oceans. QED
Joe Bastardi says:
October 21, 2011 at 10:26 am
“In the end, the one question Dr.Santer and all claiming humans are responsible for this must answer: … ”
Couldn’t their be an alternate question? Why not look at some of the fingerprint evidence developed in Livermore Labs and other peer reviewed research? Dr. Santer explains in the video some detail concerning the fingerprints and other evidence that indicate CO2 is a driver.
If the PDO were the sole driver, why would Dr. Santer have displayed a fairly strong stratosphere cooling effect (an indicator that heat is being trapped)? The PDO on its own wouldn’t display such a behavior, right?
And I hope you don’t mean the remark that indicates many of the folks that accept the evidence for AGW are agenda driven. I mean, the National Academy of Sciences put out this statement (back in 2005 I believe). I would hope an institution with such a long history wouldn’t have an agenda. I invite all to read the statement, it is succinct and informative.
http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
otter17:
A cooling stratosphere might have been an indicator that heat was being trapped in the troposphere by GHGs, but not necessarily so. In order for that to be the case, one would have to demonstrate that heat was indeed building up in the upper troposhere.
All measurements show that this has not been happening. Therefore, there must be a mechanism other than ‘greenhouse’ warming that caused stratospheric cooling. I’d suggest looking up for the answer, but waaaaay beyond the troposphere.
NO MYTH; some segments (notably commercials) can come in quite a bit LOUDER on some terrestrial DTV broadcasts. So much so, I am considering using the Line Out from the DTV receiver and running that through a compressor/limiter to resolve the problem (at least locally)!
.
otter17,
If there exists a statement on global warming by any organization, it in and of itself indicates that said organization has an agenda.
_Jim says:
October 21, 2011 at 3:15 pm
“NO MYTH; some segments (notably commercials) can come in quite a bit LOUDER on some terrestrial DTV broadcasts. ”
You’re right about the commercials, but the video shown by Rational talks about the alleged trend to compress (or alternatively limit; cutting off peaks) music… and that’s really a myth. 16bit resolution on a CD was not invented to not be used.
Earle Williams says:
October 21, 2011 at 3:48 pm
“If there exists a statement on global warming by any organization, it in and of itself indicates that said organization has an agenda.”
So would the Department of Defense have an agenda too? They seem to acknowledge security threats due to climate change and they have plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I know that the Navy in particular has set significant greenhouse gas reduction goals.
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=59294
The Quadrennial Defense Review has a section that fleshes out the DoD analysis of the issue. This report also mentions reducing greenhouse gas emissions in support of U.S. climate change initiatives. See pages 84 through 88.
http://www.defense.gov/qdr/images/QDR_as_of_12Feb10_1000.pdf
Would the AAAS also be another scientific body with an agenda? Here is a statement that seems to indicate AGW is a real phenomenon.
http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_200702/aaas_climate_statement.pdf
Keith says:
October 21, 2011 at 3:10 pm
“I’d suggest looking up for the answer, but waaaaay beyond the troposphere.”
_______
Huh? You lost me.